Everyone needs to feel at home, to feel earthed
Esther de Waal
Everyone needs to feel at home, to feel earthed, for it is impossible to say ‘Who am I?’ without first asking, ‘Where am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?’ Without roots we can never grow. Without stability we cannot confront the basic questions of life. Without stability we cannot know our true selves. …[And] the reason for stability? God is not elsewhere.
Esther de Waal
What’s important or necessary for you to make a home? What possessions are significant? Think about the houses you have lived in. What ones felt most like home? Can you say why?
What key events have made your present home? In what ways is home constraining? How do you live with this tension?
What’s special about your home? Is it some thing, or an attitude, or a longing? Why do you love your home? In what ways does your home bring you close to the meaning of life? What do you value most about your home?
What is the first place you remember? Can you picture it? Feel it? Smell it? Can you name significant paces of your childhood? Are there things about that time that you long for now? That you gravitate towards? when you seek/need comfort and renewal?
What does all this say about being at home within?
Read the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32)
and think about the older brother –
being at home, and not being at home,
not knowing that he was already home –
and think of the younger brother –
having to leave home in order to know where his true home is.
‘To live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’
Henry Thoreau, Walden
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
